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Friday, May 22, 2015

The Right Tool For The Job - making sense of data PowerBI rocks!

The Right Tool For The Job

The RightTool For The Job

TRTFTJ - Launching a new Acronym - post 2 of 2

Productivity - a buzz word on every Office Worker's mind these days.

I'm in the thick of it - people working in offices, warehouses and the likes, all stressed about 'getting the job done'. Picking the right tool, and making the most of collaborative environments and attitude - yes attitude! is an important step towards better Productivity. And keep the goal in mind; It's about thebest outcome for the Business, not the individual!

There's so much we can do right now, don't wait for the all fixing magic bullet, take action right now.

Soyou are a business owner and you know, there's tons of data stored away and obscured by complex applications - Reporting is in-flexible and often requires IT people to configure or customize to produce the answers to the questions you have today, just because they are different from the needs you had when the system was purchased and installed.

A costly exercise, that is if the vendor still exists, supports and has the resources available at short notice, this alone can be a challenge these days.

Introducing: Self Service Business Intelligence! Do yourself a huge favor and get to know your data, understand where things are stored, how to access them and once you have that power, create models that meet your needs now and in the future.

It sounds complicated, but the good news is Microsoft has made it really easy, after reading this post, take an hour out of your day to get your head around the Microsoft PowerBI tools - I guarantee a return on that investment within a day or so and after a few weeks you won't know what it's like to live without it.

Take a moment to scroll down this site and look at some of the quick videos, trust me you'll be inspired. Once that's done, download and install the latest PowerBI Designer - and let me give you a quick getting started tip. Don't get distracted by wondering how to connect to your company data sources just yet. You have or can easily create some Excel spreadsheets with lots of data you are likely to be pretty familiar with.

It's easy to get lost in the options; in my opinion you should start with a simple excel data source (a .csv file will do), create a report with the PowerBI designer and then go into the PowerBI.com environment to load the report you created and play around with the Dashboard functionality. From there you can save and share the results with anyone in your organization and quickly become the BI hero!

I kid you not you won't believe how easy this is, and how much this enables you and you co-workers to make much more sense of data in ways you've never had imagined.

Microsoft PowerBI is a cornerstone to the Reporting and Dash boarding solutions we deliver at Hedgehog Technology, a solutions provider for the logistics industry on a mission to transform the businesses of our customers.